LITMIR.BIZ

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didn’t know if I would ever come up out of the river.

       REMIND ME, AGAIN

      Mom didn’t tell me Pop had called until she was already off the phone, on her way out of the house, carrying a square of cardboard and rain pants and an ulu to help Great-Uncle Stanley cut up a seal. She said, “I didn’t have time to talk to him.” She kicked the door shut behind her.

      Anytime I mentioned my plan to move back to LA, Mom reminded me that Pop was a bastard and couldn’t be trusted. She reminded me that we didn’t have any money and that I’d just gotten suspended from work.

      Mom rushed back into the house, grabbed a plastic tub, stopped before leaving again, exhaled, and said, “Nothing’s changed. Your father still promises things he can’t deliver. He says he’s coming up to visit us, but I’m not counting on anything.”

      But that was the thing. I was still counting on something.

       THE THING IN HER THUMB

      Kiana and my mom became friends the first time they met. They bonded over something called seal finger. Kiana stopped by our house and walked around the little place, looking at each decoration and family picture, even the stereo, as if everything were exotic. Mom apologized for the mess. She said we hadn’t finished unpacking yet. It was Mom who had the seal finger, and Kiana claimed to know a cure.

      Kiana pointed to a living room wall, said, “I always wanted a map of the world.”

      It was the first time I had seen her since we’d had sex, and again I was taken by her striking cheekbones, how high and chiseled they were under her mysterious, almost sad eyes. She had a face with the strength and danger of a hundred-foot cliff.

      There was now a well-spread rumor going around town that Kiana had things to say to me, that she was pissed. And I knew it was true. But right here in our living room she acted like she didn’t recognize me. Acted like she didn’t even know me. Then I worried that maybe she didn’t. Maybe my face didn’t register. Then I didn’t know which would be worse.

      Mom held out her hand in the middle of everything, showing her swollen thumb and blocking Kiana’s path.

      Kiana said, “Real huge, man.”

      I wanted to leave the room and the house but couldn’t. I’d been avoiding the unpacking chores for over a month, but now, with Kiana here, and with the energy of all the rumors surrounding her, I was held captive, and I pulled back the tape on a box labeled PHOTOS. There were four albums and they were in good shape. I flipped through pages. Kiana kept pacing our house, faking curiosity, and I noticed the pictures were all out of order. Pictures of me as a baby were scattered, sometimes right next to the most recent. Others were doubled up or missing.

      “Why did it get like this?” Mom said, still displaying her injury in the middle of the room.

      The seal finger was ballooning Mom’s thumb. She’d been away from Eskimo life for so long that she didn’t remember how to use an ulu and sliced her finger open while trying to help Uncle Stanley skin that seal. The little bit of oil that was on the blade had mixed with her blood and cartilage under the skin. When the cut closed up, her thumb swelled like a marble inside a glove.

      “Because of the seal oil,” Kiana said.

      Mom asked, “Can we get rid of it?”

      Kiana raised her eyebrows and nodded. But it wasn’t very convincing.

      I was trying to ignore Mom these days. It had only been a month since we’d moved up and she’d already changed her last name from Pop’s back to her family’s—Ayupak. She hadn’t lived here for twenty years and she was trying to act like she hadn’t missed a beat, like she still remembered everything. Overcompensating, it seemed. Like getting a divorce and moving four thousand miles away. Like trying to skin a seal and damn near cutting off her finger.

      It was sometime this week that I heard a couple of ladies talking shit about Mom at Native Store. They were standing next to a circular clothes rack, thumbing through outdated Nike t-shirts, using her first name—Lynn. Saying Lynn always showed off by wearing fancy clothes. They said she was trying to act better than the village because she lived in Los Angeles. And they were right. Back home Mom wore tank tops and jeans, and up here she was flapping around with windy black pants and matching v-neck sweaters.

      The day we moved here a group of church ladies welcomed Mom by giving her a kuspak they’d made. It was nice, and since Mom had up and left all those years ago and never returned or kept in contact, they could’ve just ignored her. I would’ve. The kuspak was a fancy parka cover, like a dress with a hood and pockets, and it was common for ladies to wear them with jeans to church or pie socials or any village event. But Mom would never wear this one. She wanted to be as good an Eskimo as all the other ladies (or so she thought)—she wanted to sew her own.

      And I’d just found out that she’d started dating some local dog musher. My only salvation these days was work, and the fact that Pop was coming to visit us sometime soon.

      Go-boy and me were working at the fish tower again, but not together. We were sentenced to some kind of probation and separated. I’d heard Go was in a funk because of the whole thing, and I wasn’t surprised. He loved that summer job. Always had. And the prospect of losing it had deflated him. Mom tried convincing me Go was depressed, trying to argue it was something deeper than work problems, calling it chemical and genetic. She said he’d had a rough childhood, but she didn’t give any specifics to back it up. She just said that Go’s biological mom was a disgusting, messed-up woman. “A sick chick,” Mom said. Yet I knew Go-boy always strove so hard to do everything right. He was maybe down on himself for messing up at work. That, and a friend had just killed himself. Who wouldn’t be depressed?

      The whole village loved Go-boy because he was always dependable and energized and smart about how stuff ought to work. He always told me stuff like, When everyone does better, EVERYONE does better. Yet I was realizing that since I’d moved here, Go didn’t seem to be doing any better. And I didn’t want anyone, including Mom, to know I was the reason he’d almost gotten fired.

      The day Kiana and my mom met to heal Mom’s seal finger, I stopped by Go-boy’s house. He was at the kitchen table, reading a note written on a page torn from the Bible. The girl’s handwriting was in green marker, her note written on a page from the New Testament. Parts of the text were underlined with red pen. There were arrows and X’s connecting and editing things.

      “What’s that?”

      “A letter,” he said, drumming one heel on the floor in his reserved excitement.

      I was wondering if he had heard anything about me and Kiana. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but in a small village, when the word hits the air, it becomes gospel.

      “Is that from your girl?”

      Go-boy smiled, said, “It’s a list.”

      He was now tapping his heel against the leg of the chair and he leaned out of the way so I could read the title. It was called TEN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT GO-BOY.

      “Valerie doesn’t believe in heaven,” Go said, and it sounded like he wanted to do something about that.

      I asked, “What about your sister?”

      He didn’t look up, said, “Who, Donkey Kong?”

      I nodded. I couldn’t say her name—Kiana—it felt weird. I said, “Yeah, her.”

      Go-boy had told me about the nickname Donkey Kong. He’d given it to her while on a family vacation in South Dakota, in the Black Hills. They were driving a nature loop and parked by a bunch of mules. Kiana was young and she jumped out of the car with slices of bread to feed them, and when the animals started fighting, one bit Kiana on top of her head. She got scared and bled a little, and he’d called her Donkey Kong ever since.

      Go

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